The Pink Chaddi Campaign is probably the most amazing use of humour (and love, supposedly) that I have ever seen. The Alternative Law Forum, under the guise of the "Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women", have come up with the unique idea of sending thousands of 'pink chaddis' (though they later clarified that they no longer 'colour-discriminate') to Pramod Muthalik, the infamous perpetrator of supposedly Indian culture-prescribed violence against women in a pub in Mangalore. The one statement from the man that really stood out for me was

If they had to oppose something, they could have talked it out with us.

Apparently, he thinks indulging in violence is acceptable, but in a non-violent campaign is not.

In any case, the support for the campaign has been so great that they collected more than 19,000 'chaddis' within a week, and started requesting people to send their packages directly.

I think with a little more organization and some sponsorship (like maybe from Kohinoor, Archies/Hallmark and VIP/Jockey), this could become the standard response to any party or group that indulges in activities that "don't reflect Indian culture".

What say?

The winners of the Kala Ghoda Art Festival literature contests were announced over the weekend. I never submitted anything because the one idea I had, didn't sound interesting enough by the time I wrote half of it. (Actually it was supposed to be five different ideas but I could only think up the first two, and I only wrote half of the first one)

The scores, finalists and winners of the various contests can be found at the following links:

Flash Fiction - Scores, Finalists, Winners

Graphic Flash - Scores, Finalists, Winners

SMS Poetry - Scores, Finalists, Winners

Poetry Slam - Scores, Finalists. (See announcement for winners)

So do head there and take a look.

I'm not too much of a poetry buff but I really liked the SMS Poetry first prize winner.

Among the Graphic Flash entries my favourite was entry # 335 (which tied for second place) followed by 461 (which ended up first).

I've only read the Flash Fiction finalists, and my favourites among them were 168, 239, 243, and 323. None of them won, though. So if you liked a story that didn't make it to the finals, do leave a comment here.

Kusum Rohra has sifted through and collected around fifty of the funniest posts in the blogosphere in the second edition of the annual Loony Mela. So do head to her blog and check them out.

Yes, it will probably take a while to read all of them. Just imagine how much time must have gone into the selection process!

Amit Varma writes that there's a new newspaper out. It's called Mint and the bit he loves about it, is

finally, India has a newspaper that explicitly supports the values of freedom, in all its forms, that I hold so dear.

And this newspaper that "explicitly supports the values of freedom", gives you "free" access to all content on its website, as long as you give up the following information

• Your first name
• Your last name
• Email address
• Gender
• Country
• City
• Year of Birth
• Educational Background
• Occupation
• Whether you "currently subscribe to print newspaper" (Whatever that means)

In addition to this, it also requests you for your

• Mobile Number
• Industry
• Household Income Range

The reason they ask for all this information is

Registering with us signifies your complete agreement with our terms and conditions. [Emphasis mine]

These terms and conditions, or terms of use, never actually show up during the registration process, by the way.

The "Registration-required" debate, when it comes to news sites, has been going on for years now. As Adrian Holovaty says in a post on the subject , the news sites seem to be saying

The benefit of registration is that you get the content.

One of the articles that Amit's linked, is titled "What you can expect from Mint." You need to register to read that article too, of course.
So in the case of Mint, the benefit of registration is that you get to find out what kind of content you can expect.

For a website that Google doesn't even know about yet (screenshot for the sake of posterity), I think they're approaching this the wrong way.

So basically, if ever I decide that I really want to read something they have there, I'm going to use Bugmenot. Otherwise I'll probably Google for the info and get it from somewhere else.

This is why I should blog about my opinions on stuff.

When I learnt that the Kazakhstan government was protesting against Sacha Baron Cohen's depiction of Kazakhstan in the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, I thought they were ignoring the potential of making it the tourism campaign of the century.

What I felt they should have done, was build a fake village on the outskirts of Astana their capital, and call it "Home of Borat" or something. A tour would then take people through this fake village as well as actual tourist-worthy locations.

It's all worked out well, though. Borat has triggered a tourism boom in Kazakhstan. And realising the benefits, their government is now changing its stance. A popular Kazakh newspaper has dubbed the movie "The best film of the year"!

Well if they do implement my idea, I want royalties.

Until a few days ago, if you'd Googled for "failure" or "miserable failure", the first result you got would have been the US president's page on the White House website. This was accomplished by a technique called Googlebombing, and was acknowledged by Google as being a vulnerability in their search system. They also did not manually filter these results out in the interest of maintaining the objectivity of their search service.

A few days ago though, Google put in place a change that gets around Googlebombing.

By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs

Searching for a Googlebombed term now gets you information about Googlebombing instead. Read this post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog for more details.

Hope you all did something nice today. The only thing I did, was forget that it was my aunt's birthday.

I came across an interesting post from the Telegraph, by a Briton who lives in India, about the difference between the ways India, the US and UK each handle terrorism. Irrespective of whether you agree with the article about whether India's position on terrorism is by design, it should make at least make you think, "Yeah, that's my India".

A quote from the piece -

To my mind, however, the single biggest thing Britain and America could learn from India about terrorism is to be considerably more resilient and defiant about it.

When the bombers strike Bombay or New Delhi or Varanasi - as they have with devastating effect in the last 18 months, killing nearly 300 people - India doesn't flinch.

Jai Hind.

Once more an entire month has gone by without new posts on this blog. To those of you who still read this blog, I apologize for the delay. I'd blame it on lack of time and writer's block, but that won't really make up for the lack of posts, will it?
Anyway. On with the post.

The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival is back this year, and Caferati is hosting some contests again, just like last time. I hope to participate in the Flash Fiction contest this year too, though I don't really have any realistic expectation of winning, or even making the shortlist. I want to write at least one story, if not two, if for no other reason than to have something to post on this blog.

The Graphic Flash (flash fiction in a graphic format) and Poetry Slam contests both sound really interesting. Do check them out.

And if you're cell-phone happy, you might want to try SMS Poetry.

The deadline for all the contests, is Feb 4 2007, so get off that block right now. (And if you do, let me know how you did it!)

Cellphone Ringtones can now get your attention in more ways than one. Apparently, a Japanese man named Hideto Tomabechi, has come up with a new ringtone that is supposed to, get this, enhance the breasts of those who listen to it!

I mean, really! The guy claims that it's based on scientific principles. And as if that wasn't enough, some women who've tried it, say it works!

Today, it's ringtones. Tomorrow, some Smart-Alec musician is going to write a song that does the same for his girlfriend. Soon, all the musicians will be doing it. Classical musicians will come out and say how they've been producing music for centuries that has the same effect. We'll even have Breast-Enhancement Concerts!

Can't say that you'll find more women than men at such concerts, though. Men tend to be scientifically inclined, if you know what I mean, and will probably want to watch the effects of the music, live.

Whatever the effects, keep the damned ringtone away from me. I have enough complications in life, and the problem of choosing the right bra, is one I'm not interested in.

The original news article.

Thanks to Abhishek and Gizmodo for the info.

Ever wondered why Linus chose the penguin as the logo for Linux? I came across an old article again, which has a small write-up about Linus's thoughts about Tux.

Here it is.

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Let me know if you think this post belongs on Geek Whorled, my other, practically dead, blog.

Wired magazine has this interesting article about blogger burn-out.

Never thought about it that way...

This post has been moved to Geek Whorled.

Finally decided to go public with a techy blog. This one's more of a leisure area for me. :)